She adjusted the cape around her neck
by ficsme
Summary: The next great hero of St. Canard reflects on her relationship with the previous. Caveat: Explores an unusual situation. Controversial subject matter. Steer clear if 'cestfic/darkfic is not your thing. Please R&R!


She adjusted the cape around her neck. It was that time of day again.

Twilight time...when the sun had just set and hues of orange and pink were still peppering the sky, heralding a transcending stillness. From the tower's ledge, the city looked so small, awash in shadows.

It was this time of day that the nursery rhyme from her grandfather, now a nostalgic echo, ran through her mind like a mantra.

_Yellow, blue, red, blue, purple too..._

Blue was just peeking over the horizon. It was time to go. Wait, not yet, the clock at city center gently reminded her, give it another five minutes. Wait for the chimes to signal the hour. Wait for the silence to build to a deafening roar.

Silence had permeated her home as a teenager. The once raucous, loquacious personality she emanated and was often admonished for gave way to an unyielding awkwardness as she reconciled the changes in her body with the changes in her life. Soccer matches and hockey sticks turned into workout videos and school books. Her booming social life ebbed away as interests flowed and waned, and she had turned into a bit of a loner. Little girl blue.

Even her best friend didn't call her up much anymore, enraptured with his girl of the month. (She had never figured him for the type. Then again, she had never figured herself for the type, either.)

It didn't help that he had grown more distant.

Few forms at the orphanage had needed signing (she was almost convinced they were trying to usher her out the door before he changed his mind) and he signed them with flourish. Adoption. It had been a fresh start for both of them.

And yet since their relationship's inception, at the tender age of nine, he was never as consistent, never as warm as she would have liked him to be. But as she grew older, a teenager, and then later, a young woman, coming home every now and then from college, there was something in his demeanor that was off. Downright cold.

Not one to lose her hotheadedness, even in the metamorphosis of adolescence, one holiday visit she had called him out on it, in a fiery explosion of taunts and tears. The tears usually were what did him in every time, what reduced him to concede, to apologize, to soothe away her anger. So it was all the more surprising when he locked himself away in his tower for the evening, and did not come back until it was time to drive her to the airport the next afternoon (it was a silent trip.)

She shivered at the memory, and pulled on a pair of gloves, hoping they would warm her, blocking out in vain the voice that told her that the source of the cold she was feeling was not external.

It wasn't until quite some time afterward that she saw a chink in the armor. A flaw in the gem that was already rough around the edges. She had presented him with, on the appropriate occasion, a framed photo of the two of them, taken when she was quite young. For an everyday citizen to see the photo would give away his professional secrets, so she had kept it hidden away in fear he would be mad. Now, it seemed fitting that he be the recipient of such a photo, as she was about to embark on a similar career track.

This time, after having unwrapped the framed photo, yellowed with age, tears came to his eyes. "Do you know," he began, seemingly searching for the words in his emotion, "how proud I am of you?" He made motion to seize her, to crush her to him like he did when she was nine, but he held back. She just looked into his eyes, his emotions betraying him with a simple flicker, before they were deadened blank. Turning away from her, he put the photo on the mantle and went upstairs to sit alone.

But she had seen that glimmer go by. It was a glimmer she knew well, a spark she had found before as she went through each year of college, at the parties, in her lab partner, in the men and sometimes women she befriended for a drink or a dance.

It was desire.

She tried to tell herself she was crazy, that it couldn't be, but upon further reflection, it explained so much that had gone unsaid for years. It explained the pained look that had haunted him for so long, the small blot of ink on the moist, white canvas, now spreading slowly and slowly until nothing was pristine anymore.

But had it ever really been?

The first time, and not that there had been many, she went to him. He stared at her, woken out of a shallow sleep, perplexed and cautious. She simply stared back. The gap between reason and will had never felt further. Then silence. Silence that rose until it became a deafening roar.

Brushing back the strands of red hair that had fallen around her shoulders and securing them into a knot, she looked behind her. A light was on in the center of the tower. Undoubtedly, he was awake, and would be waiting there for her return.

It had a logic--albeit strange, a logic nonetheless. And now, she would be gone, at work for a few hours before she would see him again. This was life now--this was the reality she had adopted for herself.

She leapt into the shadows, shattering the silence of the night, and was gone.


End file.
